How an iPad dug up from the Thames solved museum thieves' murder plot

A Ming vase stolen from a Swiss museum. A shooting at a comedian's house in Woodford, east London. The robbery of a luxury apartment in Sevenoaks, Kent.

These seemingly unconnected events were all part of a web of international organised crime that police untangled after a six-year-long investigation.

A key piece of evidence - an iPad, found under an inch of sand on the foreshore of the River Thames just downstream from the O2 Arena.

Its discovery was pivotal to the investigation that has led to three people being found guilty at the Old Bailey of the near-assassination of one of Britain's most notorious armed robbers.

When found by a police officer with a metal detector on a cold November morning last year, the iPad was found caked in mud having been underwater for more than five years.

Forensics were able to clean it and open the Sim tray – which still contained a pink Vodafone Sim card.

Call data that was subsequently salvaged provided damning evidence on three men - Louis Ahearne, Stewart Ahearne and Daniel Kelly - who were all also involved in a heist at a museum in Switzerland a month earlier.

"I've questioned this a lot," Det Supt Matthew Webb ponders. "Is it calamitous blunders tripping them up or was it just they were so blasé they wouldn't get caught":[]}